Television

June 21, 2017

The advance and spread of cryptocurrencies requires ‘perfected’ security. It will do for identity what GPS did for location. People in the cryptocurrency economy will always be on the grid, so to speak. They will be absolutely, positively identifiable in a global, distributed web.

A public distributed blockchain is a perfect history. It will answer the question at the top of mind of every investigation. Who did what and when.

I have no doubt that a new class of individuals will arise who understand these things and will consequently make every effort to safeguard their anonymity. These will be the people who have the ability and/or connections to read and understand computer code. The rest of us will take our chances. Just as today there are people who have been able to take advantage of PGP, the overwhelming majority of people are plagued by spam.

The spam of the future will be much more insidious, and seductive.

I see the great opportunity for cryptocurrencies to be able to monetize attention in new ways. It’s rather the keystone of a post-modern economic order. Those of us who grew up with Walter Cronkite and three network TV stations have seen, dare I say, the devolution of authority inherent in there now being >2000 channels of television. Social media has expanded that to the very ends of cognition.

However all of these have been limited by the fairly narrow regimes of capitalization. Imagine, therefore a world in which social capital becomes actually fungible. I like to give the example of the rise of video games. I started out with pinball in the 70s, listening to the Eagles. Then through the age of Pac Man, then Mortal Combat in arcades. Next Counterstrike and now World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, et al in the living room. My kids grew up watching me play. They didn’t touch the controllers, they watched my gaming as if it were TV programming. Popular gamers developed a network called Twitch, it grew to 55 million gamers and Amazon bought it for a billion dollars. A network of people watching other people play videogames. The Book of the Month Club never had it so good.

Thousands of new sources of capital will create many new currencies, which will fund business models that will seem outrageous by today’s standards.

We will enter the era of populist attention capitalism and banking.

Both of these developments will have profound implications for the social order. I cannot seem to manage my speculations but they seem to all land around this conclusion.

I expect that the rise of crypto in all of our lives will lead us to be hyper-tribal. They will change our systems of trust radically. I think nationalism is under attack, and I think cities will become the new centers of power as national currencies weaken. Multicultural ethics will entrench. Who writes books will be more important than ever (if people still read and write, rather than watch and listen) Who funds armies will be more important than ever. As a stoic, I must be dour. Sorry.

July 11, 2015

Mr Robot presents us with a plausibly self-destructive young protagonist with a kind of concrete cast anti-social paranoia that most young people only wear as a mask. Still working out some very serious trust issues with his dysfunctional and dead parents, he is a wall of silence to his own therapist, unwilling to say anything he actually 'knows' from having hacked the accounts of everyone he actually knows. Thus with a full inversion, he accepts the reality of their cyber behavior merged with their cynicism and weakness in real life. He makes for a peevish sort of morality where it's easy to drop dimes on doxed kiddie pornogs and murderous drug dealers, but nearly impossible to be sociable with ordinary people whose secrets he has uncovered.

He gets in over his head by solving a DDOS attack for the biggest client (Evil Corp) of the computer security firm in which he works - a sophisticated and realistic version of Neo / Mr. Anderson. Yes he gets in way over his head, as he is seduced into working for a very Anonymous-like organization of renegade hackers called 'fsociety'. And then he dodges a bullet. For a moment he adopts the simulacrum of normality, dropping this sangfroid against Starbucks, only to get slammed back into his terrible reality by a cunning pseudo-father figure.

The protagonist, Elliot, who looks like the halfway handsome grandson of Marty Feldman, skulks around the predator rich environment of New York City, surviving his pain through an injudicious yet highly disciplined morphine addiction navigating various distances from four women who see distinct parts him from various angles.

It's a cyber thriller that is demonstrably able and savvy. It is the Sopranos for the digital Millential age. You don't want to miss it. Maybe you heard it here first. It has the potential of being as good, ultimately, as Breaking Bad. All the parts are there.

October 11, 2013

I stayed up until 2 this morning watching the final three episodes of AMC's Breaking Bad. I'm glad that's over.

The experience of the multiple seasons, which I consumed basically this year has been harrowing as time proceded, primarily because this is the kind of dramatic show I tend to avoid. Too much staring into the void, etc. The ending, outside of a few stunning dialogs and the complete destruction of hope was surprisingly wordless. There were silent tears gushing from human beings who have lost it. It seemed rather slow at the time. I expected wordification of plot and interior monologue, but met only crying eyes. The effect was useful for me to reflect upon what I knew about the characters, which was that they were complicit in their own spectacular destruction, inextricably and for the simplest reasons, just trying to deliver something to their families. Nuclear families irradiated by pride, burned down degeneratively from the absorption of too much ionizing power.

The ambition of Walter White rings a bit empty on that idea of having and holding family. Although his every rationale screams 'family', it all rather came down to a gangland omerta style of family. Family was dragged and manipulated through the darkside for a wanker's dream. What Walter White never did was teach his family. His domesticity was formal. He merely fed them. He didn't lead them by example, he didn't engage them. Yet he did provide and protect them against all odds. In that way he was a perfect manly embodiment of will whose business could only provide an inheritance unattached to actual love, caring or purpose. To Walter, family was duty but nothing else.

The car wash was never a car wash. The high school classroom was never a classroom. They were boring necessities and hiding places in the shadow of White's true calling of psychological domination. And so it was such an extraordinary adventure he took, such an exhilerating test of his qualities as a man. At every turn, he exhibited brilliant foresight, prescient character judgment, bravery, skill, nerves of steel, stunning adaptability and the kind of self-confidence anchored in his genuine conviction. He believed that in the end he could prevail, justifyably. Until he knew he was dying.

It was far, far too late. But what a downscaled drama. No red Ferraris, no silk suits, no night clubs. No gold plated guns, hot women. His double life as Heisenberg was an intoxicating power trip. Walter White had the pure thing and no insipid accoutrements. He outwitted legions. He stared down everyone, everywhere and he forced them all to obey or face the consequences. He calculated everybody's weight down to 7 digits of precision and used the extra gram to push them over the cliff slowly enough so that he could yank them back as if he cared.

But there was nothing left for them to believe in. Walter White never became invincible socially. He was too large for any family but a crime family the size of Gus Fring's operation. But he couldn't scale down the ego controlling all that power into a nuclear family sized package, and he microwaved the brains of everyone in close proximity. He built nothing sustainable into his criminal enterprise. There was nowhere to build it. Walter's world was as empty as the desert, the endless tweaking consumers, the brilliant legal and illegal hacks and the faceless, bloodless corporations. Series creator Vince Gilligan's world is devoid of structures of society that aren't weak or degenerate. The self-help circles are hopeless. The only things that function do so at strip-mall capacity. Everybody's got a hungry heart, a weak will and only desperation energizes this ill planet.

It reminds me now, remarkably like the gaming worlds of Grand Theft Auto and Saints Row. A sandbox world in which only astounding destruction can move mountains. These are worlds in which inspiration is frustrated and slow to come and only finds purchase in the hope of a spouse or a child, the lack of which is presumed and justifies a pathetic disregard for humanity. At some point everyone in this world is an unattractive housewife who drops her jaw and groceries at the sight of men of action. That's all there is. Them who can fetch the dinero, and the dirty deeds they must do.

That provides good drama for those of us who consume televised entertainment as it contrasts with what we must possess as humans lest we go so astray. And yet the radiation of such cruelty and sadness, such emptiness without pathos has a haunting banality. The empty desert heart of Gilligan's New Mexico will echo with us for a long time.

September 26, 2012

Well, it's official. Men with stubbly beards are back. They are the new swag. It's called 'swag' these days - you can read that as 'fashionable manhood'. It's not quite up to the manly standards of Commander Riker, but it's doing a bit better than the metrosexual standard we have suffered since the disappearance of Burt Reynolds, no disrespect to Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis, Daniel Craig and Jason Statham. We're about up to 85% of the Mid 80s Winston Man who was about 85% of the Marlboro Man. So things are looking up, mostly - almost to the point at which I can watch prime-time television without having to suppress my gag reflex.

Now that I'm thinking about leading men for a hot minute, I think I can safely say that we have finally gotten rid of William Hurt, Chevy Chase and the rest of the boarding school boys club of actors which forced the careers of all the other actors, save the above, into weird corners of manhood where only actors like Danny Devito, Dennis Franz and Joe Pesci could have balls. But let me not get distracted.

The subject of discussion is JJ Abrams' new show Revolution. It has a fabulous premise and it needs to grow up really quickly. And it needs to start moving with some speed, or else it will be a terrible waste. I don't know if Abrams is trying to back out of his reputation for shows that go in seven directions at once or what, because right now things are so damned ploddingly linear it's practically Gilligan's Island.

What have we got? We've got a semi-rebellious, semi-heroic, semi-motherly girl with a crossbow. She can be really good but she's got nothing on Abrams' other heroines. I guess he wanted to do young and Brave and all that Hunger Game flavor. Check. He's got Giancarlo Esposito as a smiling borderline sociopathic military commander who actually cares about his cause. Good move. You've got uncle badass with deep secrets about the origin of the plague, which is this case is a suspension of the laws of physics such that electricity doesn't work the way it used to. You've got dead dad, and presumed dead mom, and kidnapped asthsmatic baby brother as the emotional cellar for the heroine. Check. And you've got bearded fatboy ex-Googler semi-wastecase in the wasteland, and British babe with long braids, jeans and white shirts as hangers-on in the great Trek. There are boatloads of potentials here, BUT.

Here is yet another apocalypse where all of the cops, engineers, first-responders and Denzel Washingtons have just disappeared. The only rebels we recognize are women and slightly less than Mad Maxes. So basically all the rednecks (which lies deep in every American male psyche) have sold their souls to the evil, brutal and criminal Monroe Militia. Oh, didn't I mention that? No women carrying guns or water for them. Just dudes with scars on their faces and/or pitiful souls.

So for the purposes of demoralizing macho, we have an excellent platform. She ain't Laura Ingram, she's a hunter, not a farmer. But she's civilizing the wild frontier as are, I suspect, all of the women in this series so far, with nary a naughty wench to be seen. You see it's all about family, because it's all feudal now.

Here's the crux. Deeper in the emotional celler of our heroine (named 'Charlie') is the drawdown scene where her mom fired on the man who threatened her toddler life in a hostage exchange for a little red wagon full of the family's only food. Dad had the perverted thief in his sights, the thief said 'I dare you' and Dad couldn't manage to fire. Mom, with an appropriate tear and shaky hands wound up doing the deed. One shot, one kill. Motherhood is a mutha!

There are swords. There are lots and lots of swords. For that alone this is a superb vehicle, but even though it trawls at 10pm, it definitely is on the PG-13 track. Which ought to be good considering the gratuitous depravity of most of the premium channels, but well... The first commercial break advertised Clinique. So that just about says it all, huh?

We are being patient for some good storytelling, but we have been warned.

I like the whole fuedal narrative, and there is no doubt that war and revolution are coming. Who's your Leviathan is the entire subtext I'm reading into this, but I think there's an opportunity here to be flagrantly wrong or right about some fundamental feminist and other social questions. And that, my dears, is what's particularly enticing about this new dramatic world, if it can stand up and walk.

July 26, 2012

Sherman Hemsley was probably a very interesting man, but we don't know anything about him. At least I don't. It would be nice to find something about the complexities of the actor who played George Jefferson; I simply remember his cackle. And of course there's the theme song. Who doesn't know the lyrics?

It never occured to me that the apartment of the Jeffersons could possibly be worth wanting. Where I come from, only the poorer people live in apartments. Wealthy people had houses with swimming pools. Where was George Jefferson's swimming pool? I grew up in Los Angeles, and it must be said that there were only four people in all of those proto-black television shows that could be called attractive. That would be

Thelma Evans - Good Times (but who names their child Thelma?)

Michael Evans - Good Times

Dwayne Nelson - What's Happening! (but stupid and superstitious)

Lamont Sanford - Sanford & Son

We all wanted Lamont to get together with Thelma and have their own TV show. Quite frankly, Lamont Sanford was the only full-grown man with reasonable emotions, intelligence and good looks. All the rest of them, as far as I was concerned, were charicatures of characters. They should have all been skits on the Flip Wilson show.

George Jefferson got Whitey.

There was only one other character, who came to become a stock character of the Seventies, who could get Whitey on a regular basis. That was the always loud, always angry black police sargeant. George Jefferson got Whitey in two doofus forms. One was the effete neighbor Tom, and the other was the bumbling doorman Bentley. The joke wore thin. The show wore on.

Geez, there's not much else to say is there? The rest is personal because I grew up at arms distance to black Hollywood and am not unfamiliar with both Canebridge or the Al Fann Theatrical Ensemble, the twin powerhouses of black talent pumps into the maw of the Industry. There was also PASLA an acronym whose meaning I forget but whose people I remember every time I roll west up 54th Steet off Crenshaw. There were so many kids around my age just breaking barriers in the 70s on their way into mainstream music, TV and film that I almost got caught up in the stampede. But what Hollywood wanted was a corral of scruffy black moppets - cabbage patch kids, modern day Little Rascals.

Of course there were better and there were worse. I can't remember anyone saying anything bad about Sounder, or Brian's Song. But having been involved in the making of Julia and back stage for a bit at Gunsmoke, I knew the likelihood of something approaching the basic reality of my own family life was not bloody likely to get on the air, although I did get onto an episode of the Louis Lomax Show. Hmm.

What Sherman Hemsley must have known and suffered through in Hollywood certainly informed Robert Townsend. There was nothing approaching my demographic until his partners in crime made the scene, and no moment captured the attention of my slice of that until Bobby Brown's My Prerogative video. The energy and dynamism of that sweet spot of the New Jacks. Things were finally accurate enough to be called 'real'.

I never met a black entrepreneur like George Jefferson, but I knew of his counterparts in the Civil Service and political stomping grounds which were my father's domain. I saw scrappers in beige three piece suits who approached the smooth sophistication of the king of all proto-black television - Barney Miller's Ron Glass, and others who were frighteningly more like Idi Amin, grinning tyrannical satraps. George Jefferson in real life would have cursed up a hurricane. A short, unattractive one like Hemsley would have been an engineer or a doctor - but they got the insufferable ego right. Never underestimate the moxy of a black man who gets Whitey.

I suppose that I could get into an argument about what expectations anyone should have about the social significance of black Americans' first experiences and adventures in broadcast television. I'm content to say that it was what it was. I was much happier to see the likes of Max Robinson, Bryant Gumbel and Bernard Shaw, real men, not characters written for comedic effect.

February 17, 2012

The format is cool. The style is goofy. The subject is annoying. The context is comedy. The outlook is iffy.

So far, three episodes and it's about over. Key & Peele, the comedy duo who are spelunking their way through the top 100 stereotypes about contemporary male tragic mulattoes are about 75% of the way to the end of the tunnel, in the middle of the mountain of race. That's a tiresome mountain. They seem to have the comic spark to do a lot more, but I think they're milking it. In about two episodes, if they keep up this direction they're going to be squarely in Dat Phan territory.

So far, their forte has been code switching jokes which they've managed to put into some fairly hilarious contexts - the evil voice of Obama's Anger, the restaurant complaint, and talking out loud at movies. Their take on the Nazi visitation for Inglorius Basterds was inspired. But it's still a code switching joke. That could work very well in a standup routine, but I need more than that from sketch comedy. So far, outside of the Obama references (their greatest joke of all was him pulling up to a street rap contest) K&P have done no current events topics, which their quirky sense should be able to pull off.

Aside from the difficulty of Comedy Central's insistence on bleeping, which is fking annoying, K&P are not well served here. So we'll see shortly if they can step out of the bucket. The opportunity is stupendous, but they've got to get their characters more deeply situated outside of the jokes. Because, quite frankly, what is the last comic duo you've seen, the Smothers Brothers? Rowan & Martin? Cheech & Chong? It just hasn't been done in decades so the sky's the limit. That is, unless their whole concept of comedy is about breaking through one ceiling.

January 18, 2012

I live under the rock that is literature and so a great deal of what happens in pop culture just goes whoosh. I have no idea who Cat Deeley is, so when I watched the 'Amsterdam' episode of House of Lies, I didn't get it. But, I was watching House of Lies which says I'm not too far off the planet.

I dig Cheadle. He seems like the kind of dude I could chill with if only he wasn't rich and famous or if I was. So much for that dinner date - still I'm sure we would get each other's jokes. For some reason, I tend to like his latest dimensions of badass. You could click that up to a latent black man thing. The first of the two was his film Traitor, which I think is his best role yet. I didn't like Talk To Me and well, Hotel Rwanda is what it is. The problem of course is that you can't tell me that Cheadle has to do all the shy guy roles when you have Paul Giamatti doing 'Shoot Em Up'. See what I'm saying? So this new dimension of badass is equally over the top. I haven't determined if I totally like it or if it's going to annoy me after four episodes because right now it's a very Hollywood view of my tangential industry, management consulting. It's close enough to be funny as in insider joke funny. It's hyperbolic enough to be funny as in youre so ridiculous Lucy. It's patently sinful of course, after all, it's on Showtime and HBO owns Showtime. You've got to be that kind of Hollywood sick to get those reprobate producers to finance 'entertainment'. What a bunch of vampires. We'll see.

In the meantime there's a new skit duo that are as funny as... Hmm. When's the last time we had a skit duo that wasn't Saturday Nite Live or Penn & Teller? Well, now we have one: Key and Peele already being compared to Dave Chapelle. Their Obama's Anger video has gone as viral as Baracka Flacka Flame, and so it comes as no surprise that the New Yorker Nuyorkican slum village crowd will glom onto it like Eldridge Cleaver's slacks. I get the feeling that they'll be bored too soon, because Key and Peele are probably not going to go there - there being the edgy place that gives comics like Chapelle and Rock a moment to work up a politically tinged sneer. Which means they are going to be short-timers with great talent like Tommy Davidson and David Alan Greir, two other intelligent men who refuse to clown or hoorah on cue. I get the feeling that they write their own stuff too. That means two seasons.

I'm such a cynic. But at least I'll get to laugh. Does Comedy Central still bleep everything?

July 24, 2011

I have watched about eight or nine reality TV episodes, ever. Then again, I don't count Dirty Jobs and Deadliest Catch as reality TV. But there's a new game show in town that's rather interestingly shabby, which is One Man Army. It's so good that it made me do pushups.

The premise is simple. Take four macho dudes from various military, para-military, police and other such agencies and get them to compete in three super rigorous contests. For 10K dollars and the honorific 'One Man Army'. It's shabby because the production values and on screen graphics and sound effects are overdone - to the point of annoyance. The host's voice has got that mix reminescent of cartoon superheroes like Dr. Quest but not so smooth as made to sound artificially deep. I liked the guy from Superweapons much better.

But. It is by far the most difficult set of tests I've ever seen on any TV show. It's harsh. It's real.

When people complain about the levels of violence on TV, we tend to forget what real violence is like - as if we ever knew. Just one 20 second clip of Joe Theisman's leg going the wrong way or a weightlifting event gone horrible and then we instantly know what's too painful to watch. We are shocked by our ability to empathize with something that stands out from fiction. We immediatley know it's not drama for its own sake. So One Man Army impressed me with the harshness of its trials.

There are three challenges in each episode. Speed. Strength. Intelligence.

The first episode I watched, only one man finished the first challenge. It was crazy difficult.In this challenge, the contestant was placed in a tank filled with 50 degree water where the only breathing room was a hole about 6 inches in diameter. He has to breathe through that hole, then move back underwater to cut through about four inches of steel to escape the tank. This was the Speed Challenge, and the only man who finished too 45 minutes.

The strength challenge on the second show had men breaching through five barriers, one of which was a cinderblock wall with rebar. Another had them sprint uphill to fire a pistol at a target 60 feet away. One had them hang upside down and crack four safes.

I can't wait to see what they think of next, because when these guys fail, they fail hard. I'd have to say this is the unwussiest.

May 27, 2011

I had an imaginary fight with some bureaucrat and my killer line had something to do with the ability to write recursive algorithms. But I haven't written one in decades because in the ordinary course of my business, nobody can think of a purpose for their systems that might call for one.

I write custom code, but around a small universe of systems for which most of the creativity has been squeezed out. It's interesting to do balance sheet forecasting considering the effect of inventory on cash, but only for a short while.

This got me to thinking about who gets to write interesting code and for what purposes. Like who gets to write interesting books or music, you would be daunted by the mediocrity of the best-sellers. And this is a thing I keep seeing in social software.

Yesterday, I was actually bored enough to watch ABC news with Diane Sawyer, and there was a segment in which some Silicon Valley dude offered $100,000 for kids with ideas to skip college and go directly into business (with him). All predatory jokes aside, they interviewed a kid who built an electric car. An electric car, well - I never heard that idea before. There's lots of money in the idea of the new, but really. Does anybody actually believe that kid is going to get market share? Market share - especially the mass market, belongs to the big money. Big money grows monoculture. Big money social software expands monoculture.

Now think of all the social software you can. What does it do? It does very little, but it does do it in the same way all software does - by narrowing human focus into the range of interactions the programmers can come up with. In short, it runs you through a maze.

The interactivity of software is why using it is more mentally stimulating than watching television. I'd take a video game over a tv show any day. oftware does allow to interact but all the right actions are already known, and in some ways it's more restrictive than watching TV. If you are watching I Love Lucy, then you know there is a laugh track. If the joke isn't funny, you don't have to laugh. But with software, you have to interact precisely as the programmer wants you to or you don't get to the next level. Imagine not getting past the commercial break unless you laugh at Lucy's silly foibles.

In this way, even social software is close-ended. It gives you a transaction or two to generation and lets a zillion other folks see 'you' and your transactions. But you must transact to be seen. Social software is never so immersive as any sandbox video game, and never should be (unless you actually prefer There and Second Life to Facebook), but it still directs your attention. It seduces you into believing you are actually being social when you press its buttons, but what is 'social'? Social software processes the means toward shallow ends, like shopping, getting directions, going to a movie, clipping a coupon, getting something to eat. It's marginally more active than being a couch potato, but I say it's creating a new class of morons. Call them mombies. Mobile zombies.

It's Saturday. You leave the house but not without your e-leash. Heaven forbid you wander into some area where the houses have burglar bars, or even worse no signal bars. You need to occupy yourself and your social software tells you where you can find other mombies who are about your speed. You can follow and friend and like and tweet and yelp and google each other all day long. Mombie verbs, all in sentences with social as the adjective.

The programmer who sits next to me at work knows better. He spent three weekends putting down new flooring in his house. The programmer who sits across from me knows better. He installed race-quality rollbars in his convertible car. The programmer who sits across the way knows better. He went to catch some 8 foot waves. I think I know better, I finished two books last week. Call us anti-social. We've always called programmers anti-social. Maybe that's not such a bad thing to be considering what's called social.

The news is that Google stole the executive that Pay Pal wouldn't pay. So now Google is going to create a new market for the masses that makes that very important part of shopping their business. Google will never invent, nor need to invent something as useful as cash. But mombies will use this new fungible as they buy their Starbucks.

You need to know that there's money involved in all of this. People are figuring out another way to monetize your spare time. The advertizing dollars that once went into television commercials will be distributed to a new set of players in the interactive social software game. Slowly but surely all of the ads that are trapped in your TV will follow you in your mombie quests, so long as there are enough bars.

There will be better and worse social software, just as there are better and worse songs, books and movies. But what I see out there right now is pretty shallow, very seductive, and reflective of the same mass market appeal of television. So far, it ain't literature.

March 13, 2011

My new favorite TV show is Brad Meltzer's Decoded, a semi-serious exposure of the mind as the slave to desire. In this case, the desire is to want to know the unknowable or to debunk the mythical, or to substantiate curiosity for the sake of television drama. It's a unique combination of skepticism and wonder that both gets on my nerves and serves up a series of better-than-YouTube quality investigations with a cast of sympathetic characters.

The characters, Scott, Buddy and Mac, are an attorney, professor and engineer who drive around in a Porsche Cayenne to visit various authorities, researchers, crackpots and experts on the trail of finding the plausible truth of some mystery a little bit weightier than an urban myth. In that, it is very much like Mythbusters but without the edge. In the course of inviting the more dubious witnesses and theorists on camera, the team has to behave politely whereas the Mythbusters could just do everything on their premises without that need. The show has a future if they can get past the first dozen episodes and narrow thngs down to something for the less gullible. It would be a great step forward from the disembodied voices of the standard Discovery-style documentary hackery, ok well Time-Life started this crap way back when.

They've handled Hopi/Nostrodamus/Mayan end of times myths, theories about the survival of John Wilkes Boothe, mysteries around the Bohemian Club, and secrets of the construction of the Statue of Liberty. All pretty good subjects for inquiry. But very much like Man Vs Wild, a lot of the drama is sustained for the camera. There's an attorney on board and there are very quick was to get to the bottom of whether or not the constructor of the American Stonehenge in Georgia can be identified. There's a record of his purchase of the land that either can or cannot be legally divulged. They've talked to environmentalist wackos, haters of the Masons, as well as scholars at the Smithsonian, National Archives and reputable universities. It's a great mix of semi-authoritative drama, rather like National Treasure for grownups, it makes historical research fun.

The show is at its best when the trio sit and have some hardball discussions about what they think might be real and what's just crazy, generally over a MacBook and a coffee. That's good TV. I give it four stars out of five. The 2012 episode was just a bit too doofus, whereas the tresspassing on the property of the Bohemian Grove was astounding.

February 02, 2009

Like most people are to politics I am to professional sports. I only pay attention during the playoffs, and I try not to miss The Day, but if I do, no big deal. This year I hosted my first ever Super Bowl party, thanks to the fine folks at Samsung who made such things a pleasure.

What a game. It has to be one of the most exciting Super Bowls ever. I just wanted to say that I know a thing or two about football and now a few more listening to Boy.

1. Doggett. Who knew that people pierced necks? When he got in at Ben R. in the 4th, I thought it was over and the Steelers would not be able to regain the lead, but the Steelers line just stopped him dead. I saw him twice as Ben connected on the final drive, 7 yards out of the play.

2. Safety. Holy smokes what's a safety? I haven't seen a safety in so long that I don't even say it out loud when it looks inevitable.

3. The fieldgoal over. I thought my DVR was broke when some penalty or other called back a field goal and then several downs later there was a field goal.

4. Penalties. Homeboy from the Steelers who put his knee in dude's back and held him on the ground? That was brutal. Was that Harrison? There were probably 3 facemask violations. For all the penalties in this game, they kept it moving. Big up to the officials. They got it right every time. Superb officiating in a close contest.

5. I'm sure I feel about Clarence Clemmons the way some people feel about Michael Steele. I think The Boss needs to get over to Bally's because he's still got nothing on Mick Jagger.

6. Jennifer Hudson just owned the National Anthem. Sorry Whitney, it ain't yours any more. Where can I get the MP3?

7. Best answer to a stoopid question, by head coach Mike Tomlin. Well, basically everything he said because every question was stoopid. Very nicely low key. Righteous.